Ralph smiled. ‘Acre people never forget their friends,’ he said, and I heard a message to me in that. ‘We’ve long memories in this part of the world.’
‘I’m glad,’ Uncle John said. ‘It will be easier to set the estate to rights if they feel they are working for someone they trust.’ He hesitated. ‘I expected you to organize the distribution of food, not to set in train a village revel.’
Ralph Megson threw back his dark head and laughed. ‘I know you did, Dr MacAndrew,’ he said jovially. ‘But there are some things you must leave to me. I’ll not tell you how to doctor, don’t you tell me how to bring Acre alive again. It is not money they want. It is not even food. They have been hungering all this time for a little joy in their lives – you’d know that feeling yourself, I dare say. Setting the village to rights is a lifetime’s work which we can start as soon as we have properly understood the problems. Giving them a bit of hope is something which can begin at once.’
Uncle John hesitated, but then he looked at the village street alive with chatter and laughter. ‘It’s not what I had planned,’ he said slowly, ‘but I can see you may be in the right.’
Ralph Megson nodded. ‘You can trust me,’ he said simply. ‘I am serving Acre’s interests, not yours. But while your wishes and Acre’s run in harness, you can trust me.’
Uncle John nodded, and a smile went between the two of them. ‘We’ll leave you now,’ Uncle John said. ‘Perhaps you’ll come to the Dower House after your dinner?’
Ralph nodded and Uncle John turned to leave. He stopped for a word with Miller Green, and Ralph said to me in an undertone, ‘That was well done, Miss Julia. Well done indeed.’
I shot a quick glance at his face and caught a warm smile that made me drop my gaze to my boots, white with drying chalk mud. I should not have told a lie and I should not have been praised for it. So I said nothing and he stood beside me in a silence which was not awkward, but was somehow delightful. I would have stood beside that man, even in silence, all day.
‘Mr Megson,’ I said tentatively.
‘Yes, Miss Julia,’ he said, his voice amused.
‘Why are you a hero to Acre, Mr Megson?’ I risked a quick glance up at his face and found his dark eyes dancing with mischief.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘I would have thought that you would have known. Knowing everyone in Acre as you do – and they say you have the sight as well! Do you not know without my telling you, Miss Julia?’
I shook my head, a wary eye on Uncle John, who was still deep in conversation.
‘I would have thought you would have known at once,’ he said sweetly. ‘I was told you had the sight.’
I shook my head again.
‘Whose voice was it when you first saw me?’ he demanded abruptly.
My eyes flew to his face and I shook my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. His eyes narrowed as he noted the lie I was telling, and I flushed scarlet that he should catch me in a deceit. ‘I am sorry, I do know,’ I amended lamely. ‘But it sounds so silly…and I did not want to say.’
He gave a crack of laughter which made Uncle John turn and smile at the two of us. Ralph’s broad shoulders were shaking and his eyes danced. ‘No reason in the world why you should answer my question, and no reason why you should tell me the truth if you do not choose to,’ he said fairly. ‘But I’ll answer yours for free and for nothing.’
He looked at me closely, taking my measure, and then he beamed at me as if he were telling me the lightest most inconsequential secret. ‘I was here the night of the fire,’ he said confidingly. ‘I led them up to the hall, to burn it down, and to murder Beatrice. I’m Ralph Megson, her lover from the old days, and her killer. In those days they called me the Culler.’
My eyes flew to his face and I gasped aloud, but Ralph Megson’s confident easy smile never wavered. He turned away from me as if he had told me only the slightest of trivialities and then he went towards the head of the table where they were waiting for him to take his place.
I stood where he had left me, in stunned silence. Uncle John had to speak to me twice and touch my elbow before I came out of my shock and was able to smile absently at him and start to walk home.
Mr Megson watched me go. I could see his glance in our direction, and his casual, friendly wave to Uncle John. But I knew his eyes were on me. And that rueful almost apologetic smile was for me, and me alone. In the mist, with the weak sun trying to break through, I shuddered as if it were full night and I was caught in the cold rain of a thunderstorm.
I knew that smile. I had seen it before. He smiled like that in the dream, though I had never seen his face. And I knew that the next time I dreamed it I would look up over the great horse’s shoulder and see Ralph Megson bending down to scoop me up to him and to knife me under the ribs as carefully and as tenderly as he might perform an act of love. And, though the girl in the bed in the grip of the nightmare would be screaming with fright, I knew that the woman in the dream was not afraid. I knew she would see Ralph’s smile as he came for her and she would be smiling too.
6
‘So what is he like?’ asked Mama with polite interest. Stride was setting the decanter of port before Uncle John, but Mama and I were lingering with the informality of a happy family, with ratafia to drink and comfits to eat. ‘Your new manager,’ she said, ‘what is he like? Is he going to be of any use to you?’
Uncle John was at the head of the table and he poured himself a glass of the tawny-coloured port. ‘I do indeed think so,’ he said. ‘In a London hotel room he was impressive, but in the Acre street he was magnificent! I think you will like him, Celia. He’s very much his own man. I would trust him entirely with money and with responsibility.’
Mama smiled. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘for I am counting on having all three of you at home a good deal. If we have a proper manager on the land, then you, John, can concentrate on getting well and I can take Julia to Bath with a clear conscience.’
‘He was rude to me,’ Richard said abruptly. His head was turned away from his papa towards the foot of the table, to my mama, who always attended to his needs. ‘He knocked me with a sack of meal off the cart and into the road before all Acre.’
Mama gasped and looked to John.
‘Forget it,’ John advised briefly. He raised his glass and looked at Richard over the rim. Richard turned at once to my mama again. ‘In front of all of Acre,’ he said.
My mama opened her mouth to say something, but she hesitated.
John leaned forward. ‘Forget it,’ he said, his voice stronger. ‘You and Mr Megson had some difference. No one in Acre even noticed. I have been down there and I asked specifically if there was any trouble. No one even saw.’
I had to dip my head down to look at my hands clasped on my lap at that. No one ever saw anything in Acre which looked like trouble.
‘Ralph Megson is a man of the world and his judgement is good,’ Uncle John said gently. ‘He will not refer to whatever took place. I advise you to forget it, Richard. You will need to be on good terms with him.’
Richard shot a swift burning look at his father, then he turned his shoulder towards him and addressed my mama. ‘I don’t like him,’ he said. ‘He insulted me and he should not work here if he cannot be civil.’
Mama looked at Richard and her face was infinitely tender. ‘I know you are thinking of us,’ she said gently. Then her gaze slid away from his young cross face to Uncle John, calm at the head of the table. ‘Richard has had responsibilities beyond his years,’ she said, speaking to him directly. ‘He is only thinking of what would be the best for us.’
John nodded. ‘It is a good sign that Richard is so responsible,’ he said kindly, ‘but I shall be the judge of this.’
Mama nodded and smiled at Richard. He gave her one long level look, and I knew that he felt betrayed. Mama, who had relied so much on him, now had the man she loved at her side, and she would prefer his advice. She sipped at her glass. ‘Does he know enough about farming?’ she ask
ed. ‘What is his background?’
‘He was a tenant farmer in Kent and was bought out by an improving landlord at a considerable loss to himself,’ Uncle John said. He answered her as if the matter of Richard’s opinion was of small moment. ‘Losing his land like that would have made a lesser man bitter. It made him think about the rights of the landlord, and the rights of the tenants and workers. He’s a radical, of course, but I don’t mind that at all! I’m glad to have a manager who thinks of the good of the people, rather than simply the profits of the estate. And I don’t think a grasping man would last long in Acre anyway!’
‘No,’ Mama said. ‘As long as they will do as they’re bid…
Uncle John smiled down the table at me. ‘They were falling over themselves to please him when we left,’ he said. ‘If he remains that popular I should think they’ll plough up their kitchen gardens for Lacey wheat at his request. He seemed an absolute hero, didn’t he, Julia?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, and I said no more.
‘Odd I never heard of him,’ Mama said. ‘He must have left Acre many years ago, for I never met him. I wonder how he can be so popular since he left when he was just a lad.’
I shifted uneasily in my chair and Richard came out of his brown study and shot a swift hard look at me. The very question I had feared had been raised on this first afternoon of Mr Megson’s return home. I had his life in my hands. All I had to do was to repeat what he had told me and he would be taken to Chichester and hanged. It would hardly matter that the fire had taken place fourteen years ago. Ralph Megson was a fire-raiser roaming free on Wideacre, and only I knew it. It should be me who gave the warning.
He had told me a secret which would hang him, and many of the villagers as well. And he had told it me in utter freedom and in jest and daring, and he had known, he must have known, that it would place me in the position I was in now: I had to choose between the claims of my family, my Quality family, and the preferences of Acre.
Before the whole village he had told me that he was an arsonist and a murderer, and I had not cried out against him then. I had not rushed to Uncle John and told him. I had not taken Uncle John to one side before we reached home and told him the appalling news. Mr Megson’s warm smile, his dazzling defiance of the law and the outside world and his matchless confidence had won me into complete complicity. Now I had to decide whether to lie outright to my mama or to betray Mr Megson, a stranger and a murderer.
I never lied to my mama.
I had hoped I never would lie to my mama.
I had hoped there would never be a single thing I could not tell her.
‘I’ve heard he left when he was quite young,’ I said. ‘The reason that he is so popular is that he used to send money back to people in the village during the bad years. Prize money,’ I said, improvising wildly. ‘From when he was at sea.’
Richard looked at me, his face impassive. He knew from my paleness, and from the way the tablecloth twitched before me as I pleated and twisted it under the cover of the table, that I was lying. And lying not at all well. And he knew I was lying to protect Mr Megson. Mr Megson – whom Richard had named as his enemy.
‘How very creditable,’ said Mama lightly. She took her shawl from the back of her chair and draped it around her shoulders.
‘Yes, and most unlikely,’ Uncle John said.
I had risen, and I whirled around to face him, my face suddenly white. ‘What do you mean?’ I demanded, and I knew my eyes were blazing.
‘My dear Julia,’ Uncle John said in faint surprise, ‘I mean only that I suspect that it is a respectable version of the man’s life history. I should imagine that an early apprenticeship with smugglers would be more like it. And the favours he could do Acre as a local smugglers would certainly be worth remembering.’ He smiled at my scared face. ‘No need to look so shocked,’ he said gently. ‘It makes little odds. Smuggling will always take place while we have absurd excise laws, and if he can command a gang of smugglers, he can certainly organize a ploughing team, I should think!’
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I was only repeating what I heard in the village. But if he was a smuggler and now he has stopped smuggling, there could be nothing against him, could there?’
Uncle John held the door open for Mama and me. ‘I don’t think the law gives much credit to people who retire from a life of crime to a life of comfort,’ he said with a smile. ‘But there is obviously no one who would betray him in Acre. And I do not hold it against him. What I will do is have a quiet word with Lord Havering and one or two other Justices of the Peace locally, and see if there is anyone of Mr Megson’s description wanted. I don’t mind having a retired smuggler on my land, but I would object to an ex-privateer or a retired highwayman.’
‘Good gracious, yes!’ said Mama, settling herself in her chair in the parlour. ‘Why can Acre never be normal! Surely John, you could have found a manager who was not a criminal? Even if he is a retired one?’
‘A poacher turned gamekeeper is the best man to guard the game,’ Uncle John quoted with a smile. ‘Acre has always been an eccentric sort of village, my dear. I fear it will continue that way. And when it is set to rights, it may be that some of its finer sons come home again. There was an exile back today, wasn’t there, Julia? The man who had come all the way from Petersfield for the dinner.’
The guilty look on my face was as clear as a bell to Richard. I knew it as soon as our eyes met. But I was sitting at Mama’s feet at the fireside and I could not hide my face.
‘Who from Petersfield?’ he asked, seeming to care very little.
‘I don’t recall the name,’ Uncle John said. But then he remembered. ‘Tayler, Dan Tayler, was it not, Julia?’
‘Yes,’ I said, monosyllabic, my eyes on the fire.
‘Who is he?’ Richard asked blankly.
‘Don’t you know?’ Uncle John asked. ‘I should have thought you two knew Acre inside out. Julia seems quite expert. Who is he, Julia?’
‘He is…he is…’ I could improvise nothing with Uncle John’s guileless pale eyes on me and Richard’s gaze darkening with suspicion.
‘There is no Tayler family in the village,’ Richard said.
‘There is!’ I said quickly. ‘In the shanties, the cottagers.’ I knew Richard knew nothing of the families who lived on the outer limits of Acre, scraping a living off the common land. No one could ever say with certainty who was there. Only the gypsies who lived further out on the common were more wild.
‘Never heard of them,’ Richard said stubbornly. ‘Who is this man, anyway?’
Mama’s eyes were on me, and Uncle John’s. Richard was sharp and alert. I had told one lie and then another, and now I was being forced into a whole string of untruths. If they discovered the identity of the man who had nearly bumped into us with his saucepan, Richard would never forgive me for a lie and that would be bad enough; but Dench would be taken.
I might brave Richard’s anger, or even Mama’s mystified disapproval. But if I let slip Dench’s name, Uncle John would order his coachman (a London man with no local loyalties) down to Acre to arrest Dench. And at the next quarter sessions he would be tried and hanged. I could not let that happen.
The lie I had already told that day to protect Mr Megson had been weak enough. I leaned my head back against my mama’s knees to draw some strength from the feel of her satin gown on the back of my bare neck. Richard saw my fatigue and pressed me for answers.
‘Where did you meet a cottager, Julia?’ he asked. His tone was concerned and his eyes went to Mama, as if to remind her that I should not be let free to wander in the most notorious village in Sussex. ‘Did he approach you when you were walking after having left me at the vicarage? Is he a friend of that common little village girl you keep going to see? Why did you never tell us?’
‘I met him when I was walking with Clary, and Matthew Merry and some of the other Acre young people,’ I said. Uncle John held his hands to the fire and nodded, but Richard could smell a lie like a hou
nd smells blood from a fresh wound and was hot on my trail.
‘When was this?’ he demanded. ‘You never told me. And why were the Acre children talking to one of the cottagers?’
‘Oh, I don’t know! I don’t remember!’ I said in sudden impatience and in real fear that they would get the truth out of me. I had to get myself out of the room. I jumped up from my seat at Mama’s feet and took a hasty few steps towards the door.
‘What is he doing now, this mysterious cottager?’ Richard harried me. ‘And how did he get to Acre so quickly?’
‘Can’t we just forget all about him!’ I exclaimed with as near a tone of petulance as I could manage when my heart was in my mouth to hide Dench’s identity from Mama and Uncle John. My courage nearly failed me when I saw Mama’s astonished face and then caught her look at John, as if she were ashamed that I should be so rude in front of him. But I was trapped and I could see no way to go but forward.
‘Honestly, Richard! You and Mama treat me as if I were a child! I won’t be cross-questioned! I met the man in Acre, where I know many people. Mama! Please excuse me!’ I said and I whirled towards the door.
Stride was coming in with the tea-tray in his hand and he stood on the threshold and gaped to see me striding from the room in temper. He hesitated, not knowing whether to put down his burden to hold the door for me or to let me push past him in defiance of good manners.
‘Miss Julia!’ he said in a reproachful undertone. I flashed an angry glance at him and saw his friendly face full of concern.
I grabbed for the door-knob and swirled out of the room and shut the door behind me.
Then I stood still as still and leaned my head back against the closed parlour door, and stared blankly at nothing. I had never in all my life spoken thus to my mama and I felt I had hurt myself in complaining of her to her very face. And the angry tone which had come to my lips was one she had never heard before from me! And the claim that she gave me no freedom which was nonsense! And the rudeness before Uncle John! I sighed.